When President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting wind energy development on his first day in office, it appeared to solely target offshore wind farms. But buried deep in the order, Trump also halted a single onshore wind development, the Lava Ridge Wind project in southern Idaho, handing an unlikely victory to local residents and a crushing blow to the green energy movement.
Trump’s order marked the culmination of a years-long grassroots opposition effort that turned into a David and Goliath contest, pitting farmers, ranchers, and landowners from tiny Lincoln County, Idaho, against federal bureaucrats and LS Power, the billion-dollar New York-based green energy developer behind Lava Ridge.
The behemoth project—spanning 38,535 acres and including 241 wind turbines—was poised to have detrimental impacts on grazing, farming, and local wildlife, sparking fierce opposition from locals.
Trump’s action signals a turning of the tide for the green energy industry in the United States. While the Biden administration often fast-tracked behemoth green energy projects—it formally approved Lava Ridge in December—Trump campaigned on a promise to slow rapid green energy development and, instead, listen to locals most impacted by such projects.
“When I read that executive order, it was such a relief that the president took time to listen—he took the time to pay attention,” John Arkoosh, a rancher who runs cattle near the proposed location of the wind project, told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview. “I feel like we’re getting back on the right track in this country, finally.”
Since the 1930s, Arkoosh’s family has operated on a federal allotment where a large portion of the Lava Ridge project would have been built. Arkoosh and his ancestors have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars for water development, fire management, seeding, and fencing, all of which he said benefited not only their business but also the local environment and wildlife.
“We’re really tied to the land and and we really care about the resource,” Arkoosh added.
His family’s investment in the property would have been squandered if Lava Ridge was allowed to proceed. That is why he and dozens of others joined forces roughly six years ago in opposition to the development, traveling statewide to voice their concerns with officials at all levels of the government.
They argued the project would infringe on federal grazing allotments, destroy wildlife habitats, strain local resources, reduce hunting opportunities, damage wetlands, and pose an undue burden on local communities—despite being sited in Idaho, the project would send its electricity production to California. They also said its 660-foot-tall turbines would visually compromise the Minidoka National Historic Site, the location where 13,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II.
“Friends of Minidoka is pleased that the Department of Interior will put a hold on their decision,” a spokesman for Friends of Minidoka, a nonprofit organization that seeks to uphold the site’s legacy, told the Free Beacon. The Japanese American Citizens League separately said the project would “forever tarnish the sanctity of the land where so many were denied justice.”
While state officials opposed Lava Ridge, local concerns fell on deaf ears in the federal government—Biden administration officials sided with LS Power and accelerated permits for the project. In their December record of decision, federal regulators acknowledged the project would trample thousands of acres of land, kill scores of protected species, and interfere with the Minidoka National Historic Site’s viewshed but approved it anyway, saying it would help fight global warming.
“We realized pretty quick that they were just going to ramrod this down our necks,” Dean Dimond, who runs a small farm situated along the border of the Minidoka National Historic Site and within a few hundred feet from Lava Ridge’s proposed site, told the Free Beacon in an interview. “I would venture to say that anybody that was in favor of it are back in Washington, D.C., and it was all about the money. It wasn’t about those of us out here that were going to have to live with it and work with it every day.”
“It really is pretty cool,” Dimond continued when asked about Trump’s executive order. “It was put on as a priority and he said he would do it and he did it. I mean, Magic Valley, Idaho—they’re addressing that at the president’s inauguration. That’s kind of a big deal.”
A White House official told the Free Beacon that Trump prioritized blocking Lava Ridge for many of the same reasons why Arkoosh, Dimond, and other locals banded together in opposition to it.
The official said the project would be a “misuse of public lands” and noted the widespread disapproval of it among nearly all stakeholders, including Idaho residents, farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, hunters, water users, tribal nations, aviators, historians, and archaeology groups.
“We finally are going to get some relief. We’ve got a president that listens to the people and cares about what’s happening on the ground in our local communities,” said Arkoosh. “He’s for Americans and I’m so relieved. We’ve just been on a backwards slide for years and it was—it felt so hopeless. I mean, if the election had gone a different way, I don’t know what we would have done.”
Trump’s order also received praise from state leaders like Gov. Brad Little (R., Idaho) and Idaho’s entire congressional delegation. Rep. Mike Simpson (R., Idaho), whose district is home to Lava Ridge’s proposed site, lauded the order and said the project is “unwelcome and has zero place in our state.”
A spokeswoman for LS Power declined to comment in an email to the Free Beacon.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
